Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Exits Assad!

In case of Assad, a proof of life is no longer sufficient to
make him relevant. Indeed, there is a difference between being “calm under fire”
and being “disconnected from reality,” while Assad attempt to project the former
image, his actions indicates that, at heart, he fits the latter mold. More
importantly, both the revolution and the crackdown will proceed irrespective of
his presence or absence. There is no longer any need for an exit strategy for a
man who has imperceptibly exited the scene.

Tuesday April
2, 2013

Today’s
Death Toll:113 martyrs,
including 7 women, 5 children and 2 martyrs who died under torture. 58 in
Damascus and suburbs; 16 in Aleppo; 11 in Qunaitera; 10 in Homs; 7 in Idib; 6
in Daraa; 2 in Hama; 1 in Raqqa and 1 in Deir Ezzor (LCCs).

Points
of Random Shelling:301 points. Warplanes
bombed 9 points. Regime forces launched 8 surface-to-surface missiles, most of
which targeted the Yarmouk refugee camp and Hajar Aswad neighborhood in
Damascus. Explosive barrels were used in 4 points, and mortars in 105. 108
points were shelled with artillery, and 67 points were shelled with rocket
launchers (LCCs).

Clashes: 119. Successful rebel
operations included shooting down a warplane that was shelling the area of
Maaret Al-Numan in Idlib, and shelling Wadi Dayf and Khazanat Camp using
locally-made Grad rockets. In Hama, rebels targeted the checkpoints of Breideej,
Tal Othman an Al-Mughir using mortars, in addition to hitting Hama Military
Airport with two rockets. In Daraa, FSA rebels shelled Air Defense battalion
using rocket launchers. In Damascus and its Suburbs, the FSA liberated the
checkpoint of Ibn Sina Hospital and Masah Walid in Adra; they also targeted loyalist
militias positions in Abbasiyeen Square (LCCs).

News

Syrian
forces pound opposition strongholds in DamascusDamascus has become a
key battleground in the civil war. From their strongholds in the suburbs, rebel
fighters are trying to slowly push their way into the heart of the capital.
Assad has deployed his most loyal and best equipped troops there, trying to
insulate it from the violence.

Israel
Says Its Tanks Responded to Shots Fired From Syrian SideThere were no
injuries on the Israeli side, but Tuesday’s tank fire represented the second
time in 10 days that Israel had responded to fire from Syria, a sign of
increasing spillover from Syria’s bloody civil war. On March 24, the Israeli
military said it destroyed a Syrian machine gun post after two Israeli patrols
came under fire from across the decades-old cease-fire line, which is monitored
by the United Nations. Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, toured the
Golan Heights frontier on Tuesday morning, where he was briefed by the chief of
staff and regional commanders.

Syria:
UN food agency convoys increasingly caught in conflict“It has become a
struggle now to move food from one area to the other with our warehouses and
trucks getting increasingly caught in the crossfire,” said Muhannad Hadi, WFP
Regional Emergency Coordinator for the Syria crisis. “We are sometimes left
with the difficult decision of calling off the dispatch of food to a place
where we know there is dire need for it.”

Syria's
crisis: The extent of the sufferingAnew
report on the northern city of Aleppo goes some way to showing how dire the
situation is. Researchers funded by a group of humanitarian agencies, including
Britain's Department for International Development, spent two weeks surveying
52 of 125 neighbourhoods in the city, Syria's most populous, which has been
stuck in a tug of war between regime and opposition forces since July 2012. The
findings are some of the most detailed yet.

Rape
and sham marriages: the fears of Syria's women refugeesAs well as the
fear of attack , there is another more insidious assault on the women and girls
of Zaatari. Men - usually from Saudi Arabia and other gulf states - are given
free rein at the camp. Coming in the guise of benefactors offering charity, in
return many want a wife. But these are marriages of convenience - for the men
at least. So called "pleasure marriages", they give cover - a sheen
of respectability - to what is often wealthy men exploiting vulnerable women
for sex.

Disease
stalks Iraqi camps for Syrians: UNHCR"Pressure to accommodate
refugees is growing," said Adrian Edwards, spokesman for the office of the
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "The crowding is in turn having an
impact on sanitation, which is already below humanitarian standards. Congestion
and warmer temperatures are increasing vulnerability to outbreaks of diseases
as well as to tension between camp residents," he told reporters in
Geneva. As of the end of March, a total of 121,320 Syrian refugees were
registered in Iraq, Edwards said, with 90 percent of them hosted in the
country's Kurdistan region. The situation at a camp at Domiz, in northwestern
Iraq, is particularly worrying, he noted.

Assad
offers kidnappers amnesty dealKidnappers who do not release victims
within the 15 days will be sentenced to “a life of hard labor,” or executed if
their victims have been killed or sexually abused, state news agency SANA
reported. “Anyone who has kidnapped a person for a ransom and deprived him of
his liberty for political, financial or sectarian reasons will be sentenced to
a life of hard labor,” said the decree, according to SANA.

In
north Syria, eating herbs to survive"We eat herbs and collect stagnant
rainwater to drink and wash in," says 24-year-old Hisham, his head covered
in a red and white chequered keffiyeh scarf. Hisham, who sports a budding
blonde beard, was about to enter university when the fighting that has engulfed
Syria erupted in 2011. Now he has joined the wave of his compatriots displaced
by the conflict.

Conflict
dents loyalties of Golan DruzeThe Golan’s native Druze have remained
fiercely loyal to Damascus through 46 years of Israeli occupation but as the
Syrian war draws ever closer, it is dividing the tight-knit community. With the
sound of fighting between Damascus troops and rebels booming from just across
the armistice line that separates them from their compatriots, some among the
Golan’s 20,000 Druze are beginning to question their longstanding devotion to
the Syrian regime.

By
the numbers: Syria deathsNearly 70,000 people have been killed in
Syria since unrest began in the country two years ago, according to the latest
estimate from the United Nations. And that might actually be an underestimate.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said Syria's raging civil
war has made it "increasingly challenging" to collect accurate and
reliable data. But even if that number is on the low side, it does provide a
way to put Syria's conflict in historical context.

Special
Reports

Sorting
out the Syrian oppositionEven though the rebels have only loose
coordination, they have become a potent force. They have seized control of most
of Aleppo and northern Syria, and they are tightening their grip on Damascus,
controlling many of the access routes east and south of the city, according to
rebel sources. Free Syrian Army leaders believe that the battle for Damascus
will reach its climax in the next two to three months.

Amid
Syria's Atrocities, Kurds Scratch Out a Home: Will the minority group succeed
at creating a flourishing, autonomous region after Assad?The Syrian Kurds
are determined to preserve their fragile autonomy, but rebels, backed by the
Turkish government, are equally committed to nullifying it… if Syria is to
split, the Kurdish part of it stands a fair chance of emerging as the most
stable, peaceful part of the country. The most one can perhaps legitimately
hope for is that the PYD ascendancy in northeast Syria will secure a way for
Syria's Kurds and the other minorities that live among them to avoid the worst
atrocities of the civil war in Syria, for as long as it lasts by securing their
area of control, and continuing to deny entrance to regime and rebels alike.

A
Black Flag In RaqqaFor the next few hours, the men engaged in a
combative and highly charged discussion. It was about the black banner, but
more than that about the direction the Syrian uprising has taken. The men of
the house feared that it had been hijacked by Islamists, led by Jabhat
al-Nusra, who saw the fall of the regime as the first step in transforming
Syria’s once-cosmopolitan society into a conservative Islamic state. All four
men said they wanted an Islamic state, but a moderate one.

U.S.
restraint in Syria could aid Iran nuclear talksPresident Barack
Obama's reluctance to give military aid to Syrian rebels may be explained, in
part, in three words: Iranian nuclear weapons… "You can argue it either
way, but in the end I think the collapse of Assad makes a nuclear deal more
likely, because the Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) will feel more
isolated, under greater pressure, more likely to make tactical concessions in
order to relieve further isolation and pressure," Samore said Monday.
"Of course, that is not going to change his fundamental interest in
acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. I think it will confirm for him that
the best way to defend himself against countries like the United States is to
have that capacity."

Portrait
of an Activist: Razan Ghazzawi, the Syrian Blogger Turned ExileDespite
her outspokenness, Ghazzawi is also self-effacing to a fault, and she has been
uncomfortable with the international attention that came with her arrests. She
is critical of the way the international media elevates the voices of
English-speaking activists like her. “I was not fearless. I am still not
fearless. I wrote in English because they [the regime] don’t read English.
Those who are fearless are those who write in Arabic, and they write in their
real name,” she says, bringing up bloggers like Hussein Ghrer, who has been
jailed for over a year after writing under his own name.

* Bashar Al-Assad has reportedly given an exclusive interview
to a Turkish channel that will be aired this Friday, this is the promotional
clip that the channel is currently airing http://youtu.be/_L4n3edvQYA
In it, Assad is commenting on the assassination of Sheikh Ramadan Al-Bouti,
saying that he was a key figure in combating the sectarianism of the rebels and
that he was not the only religious figure to be assassinated by them.

About the Author

Ammar Abdulhamid is a liberal Syrian pro-democracy activist whose anti-regime activities led to his exile in September of 2005. He currently lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, Khawla Yusuf, and their children, Oula (b.1986) and Mouhanad (b. 1990). He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.